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2.3 Basic Navigation of the InDesign Software

This lesson will give you the tools necessary to move around any InDesign document. You'll see how to use InDesign menus, and you'll learn some useful keyboard shortcuts that you'll be using throughout this InDesign tutorial.

7.How to Share InDesign Files

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8.Conclusion

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2.3 Basic Navigation of the InDesign Software

Hi everyone. This video is just some basic navigation to work our way around InDesign and our document. The first one is zooming in and out. There is a magnifying glass, okay. You can click on this, it's the last one in the tool bar. Click once to zoom in, and if you hold down the Alt key on a PC, or the option key on a Mac. So look down at your keyboard, you might have an option key if you're on a Mac. You're probably going to have an Alt key if you're on a PC. Hold it down. And check my screen, you can see plus turns into a minus. So if I hold down the Option key, I'm using the Mac, click once, zooms out. Let it go, click once, zooms in. Now, I'm not gonna do too many shortcuts in this class, we'll do a little bit towards the end, but nobody uses that tool, okay? Cuz it's long and you gotta go and change it. So go back to your Selection tool, and we're gonna use this one. On a Mac, hold down the command key and hit plus. On a PC, hold down the control key and hit plus, it zooms in. Right next to the plus key is minus. So minus zooms out, plus zooms in. So remember, Command + on a Mac, Ctrl + on a PC. That's the one people use the most now, zoom in a bit like me, I'm zoomed in a few. Okay, how do you move around once you're in here? You can use these little see these little slide bars? Now fine. Okay, if you're finding in design quite tough in terms of just computers in general, this might be the best way to move around. But if you're not and you wanna be a little bit fancier, hold on the spacebar key on your keyboard. Watch my little cursor here changes from the arrow to this little hand. Okay, and if I click and drag the hand, so I go to my spacebar down on my keyboard, click hold drag, click hold drag, click hold drag. There it goes, spacebar, I can start moving things around, hold spacebar. And I can move myself around. You can see the scanner just sliding these little bars around. That's too advance, go back to sliding these little guys untill later on maybe you can practice with this spacebar a bit more. All right, let's go back to View and we gonna go to Fit Spread in Window. You can actually use Fit Page and Window. Okay, so my shortcut. Not gonna get in too many shortcuts, but if you find like you're doing the same thing over and over, you're like, men I'm always doing the old object transform move, or arrange in the back. You can see they all have shortcuts on them minus specifically showing for a Mac. But if you have a look through your menus, you'll see that lots of them have your particular computer's version of it. Okay, to be using a PC that's gonna say, Shift+Ctrl+P. Anything your doing repetitively, check what the shortcut is. And for me one of the ones I use all the time is View, and Fit Page in Window. Okay click on that, so reminds come on 0. Yours is gonna be ctrl + 0, if you're on a PC. It zooms all the way out, nice, okay. I've got this selected so selection tool. Red box selected. We've learned to resizing, by grabbing the corners. And rotation is, you see my cursor here, you see the diagonal line means resize. But if I go just a bit further out, look, changes to a curved arrow. If I click hold my mouse key down and drag it now, that's how you rotate things. Okay, so it's kind of like I don't know, magic zone of, between scaling and rotating and then nothing. So this is kind of like zone that you're gonna need to be in. Now once you've practiced rotating and you want to get back to how it was, so there's an undo option. So let's go to Edit, and there's this one here called Undo, the shortcut is command + Z or Ctrl + Z on a PC. So undo, edit, undo, using shortcuts will be handy for this. So undoing a few times. So edit, undo loads of times until this guy is straight again. Two more things I wanna show you is I actually want this, this green box down the bottom to be a third of my document, okay? I don't like it when I've just kind of like magically picked. I don't know there's some wierd things where if you actually divide things properly, like thirds. There's kind of an unwritten visual language that really helps when you are abiding by some of the rules. So rather than just like guessing half and going, about half, I don't know. They eye kind of looks at and goes, there's something wrong about your comp. You can't put your finger on it but just something a little weird about it. So, I'm gonna show you how to do a little bit of maths in these. So what I wanna do is I'm gonna make this green box the full size of the US letter. And over here, a cool little thing you can do is the width and height. The W and the H. So, the height, I'd like it to be a third. So, it's 11 inches high, instead of trying to do my math, which I'm terrible at, I can go divide. So I'm just using the backslash on my keyboard, divide by 3 please. And hit Enter on my keyboard, magic? So now I know that that is exactly one-third. You can divided it by half. You can times it by 2. Timesing by the way is, in here, it's the asterisk, okay? It's normally tied in with your number eight key or over on your number keypad. But I times this by 2, I did the width [LAUGH] times by two, you get the idea. I'm gonna go back to my edit, undo, and now I know that that is exactly one-third. I'm gonna stretch it out to be part of the blade. And then my happy little graphic designer brain is, that's how it should look. Things are lined up with the margins for no good reason and that is exactly one-third. Two of the things I wanna show you is the range. So let's say that I grab my green box and I want it to be over the top of this pink box here, okay? But you can see this guy is on the top, I call it pink, it's red, red not red, nuclear red. It's a grayed on nuclear red, had a motorbike once that was nuclear red. We've run our store as pink. But anyway, we want the green box to be above the nuclear red box. So with the green box selected, right-click it. And let's go to our range and let's bring it to the front. Cool? So that's how you kind of move the order of things. So that's in the back now, then this nuclear red box, then the green box. And say I want the nuclear red box to be back in the front. I can right-click it and say actually I want to Go to Arrange, Bring to Front. If you are finding problems with right-clicking, you're like, hey my Mac doesn't have a right-click. You can, all the things that are hidden in the right-click which are quite helpful can be found in these top menus. I happen to know that object arrange is in here somewhere, where are you? Right on the top and bring the front. It's great at the moment because it's already at the front, okay? But I can send it backwards, object arrange, bring to front. All right, one last bit of navigation I wanna show you, I wanna put that back there, is the W key. So be on your black arrow, hit the W key on your keyboard. Click on it, [SOUND] look at that. It's more of what it's gonna look like when it prints, okay? It's not exact, but it gets rid of all the little kind of bits around the edges, okay? So let's click off on the background. So to deselect, there's a long way. Let's go to Edit and go down to Deselect. You could use as a shortcut as well, which Cmd + A. Means I've just got nothing selected, or do what everyone does and just click with your black arrow over here somewhere in no man's land, just lets go of everything. How to get back, hit the W key again. W, on, W, off, on, off, on, off, okay? It's just really handy. Can you see, it even hides the bleed, cuz we know that that's gonna be trimmed off in the bin. So when I hit W, watch, it just goes. Gives me a kind of a more of an idea what these things gonna look like. And just, I don't know, bit of visual cleanings. The long way for that is down here. Can you see this one? If I click on that, if I click and hold that down, okay, normal preview. Hold it down again, normal, hold it down, preview. You can see how tiresome that is by clicking it. But that's the long way. And that is it for basic navigation, zooming in and out command plus or minus or control plus or minus, when I am zoomed in, spacebar moves me around. Clicking on things. This is no man's land for rotation. Edit, undo to get it back. We can do some basic math in these fields. Divide by 3, times by 2, and my favorite, the W key. Goodbye, W, W, W, W. One little tip though is, if you're in the type tool, which we'll do a little bit later on, and you start typing the w key, what's gonna happen? It's just gonna type a W, so you might have to go the long way. But as long as you're not in the type tool, the W shortcut is perfect. All right, that is going to be it for navigation. Let's get into the next video, which we will look at fonts and type, all that sort of good stuff. I'll see you there.